How to record students attendance in Moodle course #MoodleTips

Are you still recording the students attendance using a paper chart?or else Do you record attendance in Excel sheet? Do you know that you can record students attendance in Moodle?

Recording the attendance in Moodle will give you many advantages over the traditional paper chart method like:

You can easily see a students attendance record for a particular month.

Students can also see their attendance history as you have recorded.

You can easily set all the possible days to record attendance at same time.

It also allows you to set point values for Present, Late, Absent etc which can be later added to the Moodle gradebook.

In this article, I will show you how you can record students attendance in your Moodle course.

Introducing the Attendance Moodle plugin:

To get started you need to install the Attendance Activity plugin in your Moodle. The Attendance activity allows teachers to keep up a record of attendance online by replacing a paper-based attendance register. The teacher adds Attendance as an activity of a course, and then sets up the sessions for which attendance is to be tracked.

A new attendance activity can be added to your Moodle course in a similar way as any other activity.

Adding an Attendance activity in Moodle Course:

Enter the editing Mode by clicking the Turn Editing On button.

Click Add an Activity or Resource.

Select Attendance.

On the General section of the “Adding a new Attendance” page, you’ll see “Attendance” already entered as the name and a default point scale of 100 selected. Configure them as per your requirements.

Click Save and Display to complete the Attendance activity options and begin the process of adding sessions during which you will take attendance.

Repeat Every – Select the frequency of your class. If you are meeting every week then select 1 week and so on.

Repeat until – Specify the last date of the session.

You can also choose if students can be able to record their own attendance.

Adding Attendance Status:

By default the activity comes with “Present”, “Absent”, “Late”, and “Excused” status. In case you would like to add or remove the status or corresponding points, just go to “Status Set” tab and change.

Taking attendance:

You can take attendance for a session by clicking on the Play/Green radio button on the session rectangle’s right-hand side. Usually, most students are present in class, and only a few are absent. To make recording the absences more efficient, you can click on the “P” at the top of the grid, which will mark everyone initially as “Present”.

To change the setting for a student who was actually absent that day, click in the “A” radio button in that student’s row, to mark him/her absent. When you are done, Click Save Attendance at the bottom of the page.

Attendance Reports:

You can extract different reports from the attendance activity. Go to the attendance activity and click the Reports tab. Here you can check out on Monthly, Weekly, Daily, All, Low Grade students etc.

You can also export the attendance report to MS Excel, Open Office of Text file format.

Attendance Block:

In order to simplify the attendance recording, you can use the Attendance block plugin. It provides an easy way to record student attendance and provides students quick access to a summary report for their own attendance. This block provides quick links to features such as reporting, taking of attendance and adding new sessions.